The Omnivore has launched a bespoke dating service that seeks to match couples
up by their book tastes.

Fleur Macdonald proved how literary sensibilities can make or break a relationship when she caught a boyfriend reading an inferior edition of Virgil, and promptly dumped him.

In a bid to save others from a similar fate, Macdonald, co-founder of literary review website The Omnivore, decided to branch out into a dating service that matches couples according to their tastes in books.

If there is now a dating site for every demographic, The Omnivore’s resulting “pin ups” section seems to be aimed at the “intello-hipster”, an urban subgroup who know their Dickens from their Deleuze and like their profile pictures sepia-tinged.

Anyone wanting to be a pin-up has to answer a series of questions: the sexiest book they have ever read, which author they have a crush on and what they’re reading next. Curious browsers are invited to email and ask for a date. The site’s creators then contact the pin-up to check the interest is mutual.

Macdonald, who set up The Omnivore along with Anna Baddeley in 2008, said the first date had already been arranged.

Users pose with a copy of one of their favourite books: choices range from the highbrow (Homer) to the more simple (The Very Hungry Caterpillar), and a witty blurb prefaces most of the profiles: “Natasha is a (nearly) 25-year-old librarian from Whitechapel with a penchant for older Hungarian men. Check her out on a date, but remember to bring her back on time!”

While some of the answers are arguably less cringe-inducing than their mainstream online dating equivalents, others read like submissions to Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner.

Meet 30-year-old Richard from London, who when asked which book he would give someone he was trying to impress responds: “I’m about to give Umberto Eco's Foucault’s Pendulum to a girl who reads Dan Brown novels... It’s so meta that after reading it, you question how many layers of reality there are in the world, and if they are in fact the same as layers of narrative or indeed, irony.”

Or Jaspreet from Cambridge on the last book he read: “I just finished some of the Récits en rêves of Yves Bonnefoy, the most distinguished living French poet. Though you wouldn’t know he was if you tried to find his stuff in a bookshop: most of it hasn’t been translated into English yet, alas.”

Macdonald said she also launched the project to show The Omnivore could do love as well as hate after its Hatchet Job of the Year award for savage book reviews attracted international attention – this year’s gong went to journalist Camilla Long for her take-down of Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath – and because literary tastes were often more revealing than generic dating profiles.

She added that media interest in the matchmaking site so far had largely been from the US, and a State-side expansion could now be on the cards.

“I think that English people can sometimes be a bit afraid of appearing over intellectual. Americans really don’t have that sort of problem, they love talking about how clever they are.”

Other dating sites, such as the New York-based alikewise.com, offer to match people according to their favourite books, but The Omnivore pin-ups is the first to fully profile the literary sensibilities of their members.

For the moment, The Omnivore pin-ups lists only around 20 members, most of whom are based in London and work in the media – including Nirpal Dhaliwal, the former-Mr Liz Jones. Submissions to become a pin-up are still being accepted, but those applying for dates should perhaps be wary of seeing their meeting turned into a blog post or even a future novel.